


Faery Tale

by JCMorrigan



Category: Slender Man Mythos, The Look-See (Web Series)
Genre: CreepyPasta and web horror are our generation's fairy tales, CreepyPasta style, Fight me if you disagree, Gen, Horror, I just didn't feel like doing second-person, I'll look for any excuse to write fandom horror won't I?, Inspired by two things, One: noticing the similarities in design between the two monsters, Two: thinking about the classic connotations of fairies, You could self-insert I guess, narrator of ambiguous gender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25588252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JCMorrigan/pseuds/JCMorrigan
Summary: I warned him of the dangers of the Fair Folk, but he did not listen.Traditions exist for a reason. Heed them.***A fairy tale used to be a cautionary story to tell people to beware the wood. Legends abound with precautions as to how to ward fairies off. Lots of similarities to modern web horror, if you think about it.
Relationships: Original Sibling Characters - Relationship
Kudos: 6





	Faery Tale

**Author's Note:**

> There are actually many more fictional monsters I've seen that have the same basic design elements as the Slenderman and the Look-See, but largely belonging to works too small to really fanfic about.

Our family is woodland folk. As such, for generations, we have passed down the knowledge of how to repel the Fair Folk.

There is no end to the instruction manual that allows you to keep yourself safe from these tricksters. Sometimes, they can be warded off as easily as noticing your shirt is on inside-out. Sometimes, you will need something stronger: St. John’s Wort and ground four-leaf clover in hardtack dough and baked. (Do not attempt to eat this yourself, should you be human.)

I practiced these religiously, knowing what the Fair Folk could do if you weren’t wary. My uncle disappeared after attempting to dig into a fairy hill, trying to reclaim a lost possession they’d supposedly taken from him. My aunt was luckier; she recognized the lights on the hill as a will o’ the wisp and shied away. Had she followed, she may have wandered limbo for eternity. The things that lived in that wood terrified me, and so I turned my clothing inside-out, slipping all sorts of hard bread into my pockets, wearing iron charms forged into powerful sigils.

But my brother was always a skeptic. He claimed the family disappearances had “rational explanations.” Such as falling into the creek. The will o’ the wisp, he said, was a light pattern, a trick of the eye.

I never understood why he didn’t think the Fair Folk were a rational explanation. Everyone else in the family accepted their existence as we accepted that water was wet and the sky rested above.

Eventually the day came that the older generations of our family died out, and the only way to continue the bloodline was if my brother or I wed, which seemed a long way off from where we were. We buried our parents in the wood; my brother laughed as I scouted clearings for signs of the Fair Folk. A circle of mushrooms scared me right away from what my brother thought was a prime plot.

“You need to stop being a coward,” he would tell me.

“And you need to be careful,” I warned him. “The way you act, they could take you!”

He always laughed me off.

I made him a talisman in the family forge. Made him swear to wear it near his breast. But warned him that it could not save him from everything. Some of the Fair Folk were too powerful to be repelled, and if he walked through the domain of the Unseelie on purpose, he would most certainly attract attention that no talisman could dissuade.

There was never any convincing him. Not until the night that fate taught him a lesson.

* * *

He burst through the door laughing. “You’ll never believe this!” he cackled. “I think those creatures of yours might just be real after all!”

My heart nearly stopped. I had been reading by lamplight; the night was thick and dark outside the windows.

“Did you take the forbidden path?” I asked in a panic.

“It was a shortcut,” he said flippantly. “I think I pissed one of them off, though. Come have a look.”

I did not want to come have a look. But I knew it was a necessity. I needed to know what evil he had brought to haunt our home.

I crowded beside him at the window, squinting out into the darkness, past the reflection of our lamps from indoors.

“See it yet?” he asked. “It looks like a goddamn tree.”

That inspired me to look at trees as though they were Fair Folk, and all of a sudden, it melted out of its camouflage. I could see it, now. Tall and slender, almost humanoid if you stretched a person out on a rack and they simply pulled like taffy instead of breaking. Dressed in black. I couldn’t count the limbs; there were definitely more than two. What proved it wasn’t a tree was the face – or lack thereof. Just a pale white head bobbing atop the slender frame. No distinguishing features.

I’d heard this was why they were called “Fair Folk.” Because of their pale complexion, unmarred by such diversions as eyes. My blood ran cold as I whimpered, “What did you do?”

A shuffle. It was gone, retreating into the wood.

“It will come back,” I worried. “You have brought this upon us!”

“Relax,” he told me. “It’s harmless.”

“Why do you still not believe me?” I shrieked. “You have seen it with your own eyes!”

“I don’t have proof it’s dangerous yet.”

I grabbed him. Shook him hard. “You are NEVER to take that path in the wood again! You are NEVER to remove your talisman!”

He agreed, but only to humor me.

I got no sleep that night, tossing and turning in my bed and thinking about…it.

* * *

The repercussions lasted for weeks.

Even though my brother (supposedly) never encroached upon the Unseelie domain in the wood again, and swore he watched for fairy rings, the entity he had angered showed up outside our house every now and again. Silent and steadfast as a watchman.

Waiting for him.

He always just laughed. “It’s a persistent fucker! You think it wants to lie with me?”

“I think you should make amends to it,” I told him. “There are rituals in the old books in the cellar. We can drive it off.”

“No need,” he told me. “All it ever does is watch and wait. It won’t make a move.”

No ritual would work unless he consented to it, so I let it lie.

* * *

Then, one night, he did not return.

* * *

I waited two days, just to have a sense of false hope to marinate in. Then I went to town, far from the wood, to recruit a search party for him.

We found him soon enough. But it took us a while to find all of him. He came in pieces. A foot by the creek. A hand stuffed in the hollow of a tree. There was plausible deniability that he was my brother until his head was found mounted on a branch that seemed a mile above the earth.

His protective talisman lay in the mud below. Worthless, because he had simply given his foe too much power for it to do any good.

* * *

I clutched the pendant in my hands, rocking back and forth and sobbing, alone in the great manor that had once belonged to a fairy-fearing clan.

If only he’d listened to me. He was the last companion in my life; I was not prepared to let him go. I could not release him, not ever.

But that only put in mind one of the legends passed through my family, of an Unseelie being similar to the entity he had summoned. And like my brother before me, I chose to ignore the legends to preserve my own peace of mind.

Thus I did myself in.

I write this account knowing my time is short. I could buy myself years if I had it within me to bury his talisman, to throw it in the creek, to forget he ever existed.

But I welcome death, now. It was a relief to find the trickster fae’s parchment slid under my door, written in a hand suspiciously similar to that of my deceased brother:

“IF YOU YOURSELF CANNOT RELEASE, THEN IT WILL COME TO TAKE A PIECE”


End file.
